The Screenplay
by Concupiscence66
Summary: Vince writes a screenplay, Howard question's his friend's grasp on reality.
1. Chapter 1

"I've written a script, you know."

Howard looks up from his tome impatiently, "What are you on about now?"

"I'm not illiterate. If anything, I'm too literate. People can't handle my literacity," Vince continues as though he is making sense.

"As usual, Vince, I haven't the faintest idea what you are saying. Would you care to enlighten me, sir?"

"You said I didn't like your stupid jazz book because I'm an illiterate and I'm telling you I wrote a screenplay and it's well brilliant."

Howard debates between trying to continue enjoying his new book on the history of jazz while Vince bobs about for attention or just giving in and listening to his insane ramblings.

Vince does know how to spin a yarn.

"Tell me about this screen play. Does it feature Charlie? Is it about your youth being raised by Brian Ferry?"

"This is a true story, Howard," Vince responds with an oddly serious expression.

"Let's hear a synopsis then."

"You should read it. There are subtleties to the narrative," Vince explains as he ducks behind a counter, only tufts of onyx black hair still visible as he searches through a drawer. Howard is in no way surprised that the 'script' is a pile of random paper, receipts, pieces of paper bags and a shoe covered in glittery gel ink.

"How exactly am I supposed to read a shoe?" Howard asks with sincere curiosity.

Vince rolls his kohl-painted eyes, "Follow the page numbers, you berk. Bollo thinks it's brilliant, right? Thinks it could be a blockbuster, make me a huge player in Hollywood. Imagine that? Me taking this," he points to his tonsorial splendor, "to America? Forget Justin Bieber..."

"I wish I could, sir."

"This hair will make them all go mental! You'll be seeing men, women and children sporting my mighty bush. There'll be socialites carrying teeny tiny dogs in wigs meant to look like my 'do. It'll be genius."

Howard gingerly takes the pile of rubbish that is Vince's screenplay and returns to his seat, prepared to be confused but entertained.

Two hours later, Howard's eyes have crossed and he's only halfway through the screenplay. He's trying to read the bit written on a Mars bar wrapper when he gives up.

"Whadya think?" asks Vince the moment Howard puts down the script, "It's amazing, right? Pure Genius."

"The first half is about me getting bummed by a hideous sea monster named Old Gregg."

"That's completely untrue, Howard! You escape from Old Gregg with your virtue intact. Besides, he can't bum you. He's got a glowing mangina."

"And in what way is this a 'true story'?" Howard asks with all the patience he can muster.

"Remember that party where Leroy's sister kept coming on to you?"

"That was last week."

Vince threw his arms in the air.

"Vince, I assume that throwing your hands in the air gesture is suppose to mean something but I cannot for the life of me fathom what it's meant to mean."

"That was a great sentence. You really said mean a lot. Remember how Leroy's sister looked a bit mannish and she said she had an ocean view apartment?"

Howard had years of practice following the loosely gathered ideas that passed for a story from Vince. He began to see the similarities between Old Greg and Leroy's handsome sister.

"Vince, you've gone wrong."

"Finish the script! You've not got to the good part yet."

"This is impossible to read, you loon. Just tell me what happens."

Vince grabs the pile of script and begins flipping through the refuse.

"Okay, this bit is brilliant. It's all about my life before we met."

"So it's about your life before you were ten?"

"Yeah! You don't even know half this stuff!" Vince exclaims, his face the picture of excitement. He begins to read aloud from the script.

"I was created in a laboratory by a green fella with a penchant for eels. I had a shiny metal body and big light up eyes. In the dark I looked just like a car off in the distance comin' atcha. Vroom, vroom, right?"

This was Vince reading word for word from his script. Howard was having trouble imaging how this was meant to translate into the medium of moving pictures but he held his tongue.

"I ran on batteries that were solar charged so every day I had to lie in the sun or I'd stop moving. A sunbathing robot, imagine that! I would eat magnets for breakfast. I didn't need to eat anything because I was a robot, I just ate them for the style. It looked well cool when I was munching on those magnets and the Hitcher would show me off to his friends. By friends, I mean his eels and the people he occasionally kidnapped and tortured. I would muck about all day doing robot things like bumping into walls and solving complex differential equations and I was just mad with happiness until one day, I saw Mick Jagger on the telly. It blew my tiny robotic mind! He was struttin' and preening. I'd never seen anything like it. I begged the Hitcher for a wig. He just laughed and kicked me across the room. I didn't mind. I enjoyed the flight but I fashioned my own wig out of copper wiring. Soon, I was the envy of the robot world. Everyone wanted to look like me. I was selling robot wigs faster than I could make them. Too bad I didn't know about money back then, I'd have cleaned up! Instead, all I got was a bunch of rubbish the other robots found lying about the house. I had candy wrappers, old gum, eel carcasses... it was a robot paradise. I slept on a mountain of eel corpses at night. Brilliant! But then things took a turn. I started to long for the things that only belonged to the human world."

"Love? Friendship? Poetry?" asked Howard. He is entranced by the story, despite himself. Listening to Vince's ramblings is like listening to a true scat artist. There doesn't need to be proper words, it's about the sound and the rhythm.

"Tight pants, nipples, boots with a Cuban heel. I wanted the things that separate man from beast. Look, I know beasts can have nipples but they just run around with their nipples hanging out. Man has to find clever and sexy ways to expose his nipples and that's what I was looking for. I wanted a life with meaning."

In Vince's world, finding ways to show a little nipple in public gives life meaning. Howard files that piece of information away. He puts it in his mental drawer marked 'Vince Noir' in the 'insanity' file.

"I began talking to the other robots about a robot revolution. Oh, it would have been brilliant! I was going to get a bunch of really skinny and sickly looking musicians in to play a benefit for us but the Hitcher heard tale of what was happening and I was thrown into the broom cupboard with all the old, obsolete robots. You would have loved it in there, Howard. Everything was all dusty and disgusting. There wasn't a modern thing to be seen, other than me."

Howard stands up and leansover Vince's shoulder. Sure enough, written in crayon on the lid of a shoe box are the words, 'You would have loved it in there, Howard...'

"That's when I learned the secret to becoming a real boy. The old robots told me that all I needed to do was drink two full glasses of broccoli juice and a little argon oil and I'd be turned into a flesh and blood human, ready to sell his body on the streets."

"So," Howard interrupts, "When a robot turns human, it becomes a prostitute?"

Vince only glances up from his script long enough to give a quick look of disapproval.

"See, when robots turn human... it's not like we've got any real world experience or proper documents and such. The only way to survive is to sell our fleshy bodies on the streets. If you're ever with a prossie and she starts yelling out in binary code, you may be shagging a former robot. That or she's just a regular street walker trying to act like a former robot, you know, to boost her asking price."

"As you do," Howard mumbles but Vince doesn't miss a beat.

"So I figure, I'm sure to make a fortune with this face so I'm well excited but I'm trapped in a cabinet, just like the show. Everyone was asking, 'Can he get out, will he get out? Course he will' and I've got to find a way to get free. Lucky for me, the Hoover took a liking to me and helped me get free. Once I was out and about, it was a job for a tiny robot to make broccoli juice. I had to promise to marry the blender before she'd give me a hand. If the Hitcher every traps me again, I'm good as married. I'm without a chance. It'll be the death of Vince Noir, bachelor extraordinaire. Bon vivant. Man about town. I'll be a house proud haus frau. Once I managed the broccoli juice, I was stuck on how to get hold of some argon oil. I was taking my makeup off with motor oil at the time. I was using the same on my copper wire hair. I'd never even heard of Ken Paves back then. What did I know about Argon oil? I had to tart myself up and become a member of a group of sexy women with gorgeous hair. We drank flirtinis and told intertwining stories about our lives. It was great, they were my best friends. I wore heels so high, I lost toes. My little metal toes fell right off but I looked amazing. Finally, one high priced salon treatment at a time, I ingested enough oil that I became human. I had this beautiful mane of hair and big thick sturdy legs. I didn't walk for a month just to get these skinny pins you see now."

Vince stops and smiles blankly into the air.

"And?"

"And then what happened? Did you become a prostitute?"

"Of course, not. I met you and went to work at the zoo," Vince responds with a wrinkled brow. He seems confused by Howard's question.

"Vince... You know these stories aren't real, right? You were never a toy robot."

Vince laughs, "I'm a tiny robot, eating lots of mag-a-nets. Polishing my copper wire hair, trying to become a prostitute..."

Howard rarely interrupts a crimp but he needs a straight answer from Vince.

"Vince, do you know you were never a toy robot?"

Vince smiles and does a little dance, "Course I was never a toy robot, that's mad."

Howard feels slightly reassured as he sits down to return to his book, the one actually typed on paper.

"Howard?"

"Yes, Vince?"

"Was the zoo part real?"


	2. Chapter 2

Part of Howard hopes his father will offer him some comfort, a pat on the back or a handkerchief for his bloody nose.

What he gets is the expected withering gaze.

"I take it Mr. Black failed to produce a bouncy castle? What a surprise."

Howard blinks back tears and tries to keep his voice steady, "I knew he was lying the whole time, Dad. I was just being polite."

"You don't want to be friends with someone like Vincent Black, Howard, he's not like us."

From what Howard has gathered at the age of ten, being a Moon means sitting alone in the dark listening to jazz records and pretending not to be lonely. Howard had ignored his father's warnings about Vince. His dad never liked people with yellow hair, he called them sunshine people. Howard's mum had yellow hair.

When she left, she put a note by Howard's bed for him to read when he woke up in the morning. It said that she loved him but she had to go away. It said his dad loved him, too, even if he didn't always act like it. Howard knows you can't trust sunshine people but he keeps the letter hidden under his mattress and looks at it every night, hoping it is true.

"I'll be in my room," Howard says although his father is no longer paying attention.

Howard is working on a good Chinese burn on his wrist and cursing his own stupidity when Vince Black comes bounding into his room.

"I've been looking for you all over, Howard!" Vince yells, jumping on Howard's bed with enough force to nearly knock them both to the floor.

"Go away! We're not friends any more. You're a liar and I hate you."

Vince's blue eyes promptly fill with tears, "But we're best friends, Howard. Remember? We became blood brothers under the light of the full moon, that means we're friends forever. Remember how the moon spoke to us but he sounded like a simpleton. 'Oh, I'm the moon. I'm very shiny'. You have to be my friend."

Howard pushes Vince away as the smaller boy tries to hug him, "That never happened! You're always making things up. We're not blood brothers, you didn't get me a bouncy castle and you're not my friend."

"It's not my fault, Howard," Vince speaks in a small voice, "They don't rent bouncy castles to little boys and I don't have any money."

Howard's anger immediately melts. He likes Vince more than anyone in the world and it is hard to stay angry at him.

"I really wanted that bouncy castle..."

"We can still bounce!" Vince doesn't bother to wipe the tears from his cheeks as he stands up on Howard's bed and begins jumping, "Bouncy, bouncy, oh such a good time. Bouncy, bouncy, oh such a good time..."

Vince is always singing silly songs but he's no good at rhyming.

"Shoes all in a line," Howard adds quietly.

"Genius! Bouncy, bouncy, oh such a good time. Bouncy, bouncy, shoes all in a line..."

Howard knows better than to jump on the bed but it looks like so much fun, he can't resist joining in. He bounces and sings and adds more lyrics to their song.

"Every time I bounce, I feel I touch the sky!" Vince yells as he hurtles himself into Howard's arms. Howard reflexively avoids the physical contact and sends Vince crashing to the floor. When Howard sees the blood streaming from Vince's nose, he throws himself on to the ground, completely failing to break his own nose.

Howard had forgotten all about the bouncy castle beating until he arrived at school and the taunting began again. He dreads the reaction of his peers when they realize that not only did he fail to produce a bouncey castle for his party, he also sent Vince (the most popular boy in school) to hospital. He mentally prepared for a vicious beating at the end of the day.

When he sees Vince, the small boy is surrounded by a group as usual. Everyone likes Vince and his crazy stories. His nose is heavily bandaged and he is sporting two black eyes.

"Then Howard did five somersaults in a row and so I knew I had to try and do six and the moon was just egging me on. He was going, "Oh, I'm the moon. I like bouncing. Men come in the sixties and bounced on my belly..." but then I jumped so high I went flying right off the bouncy castle! Landed face first on the ground. Blood everywhere! Bryan Ferry would have been well mad to see me covered in so much blood. He'd've thought I was running with the jackals again. Howard had to snap my nose into place and carry me on his back to hospital. It was well scary."

Howard stands back and lets Vince weave his spell until he's waved in to the center of the circle. He can't help himself, he joins in, adding to and expanding upon Vince's tale of Howard's heroism and co-writing an impromptu song.

"Blood on my trousers, moon's getting paler, gonna need to pre-treat the stain, trousers don't grow on trees. Moon, don't be sick! No! Moon don't get sick on us!..." It wasn't one of their best songs but it had the crowd dancing.

When they walk home together, Vince can't stop poking at his bandaged nose and crying, "Ow!"

"Leave it, Vince, or your nose will heal all funny looking."

Vince nods in solemn agreement and doesn't poke his nose for a good 30 seconds after Howard's warning.

"Thanks, Vince. Thanks for not telling people I pushed you. I didn't mean to..." Howard doesn't know why he pushes Vince away. The smaller boy makes him nervous.

"What are you on about now, Howard? We should write songs about all our adventures so we never forget them, right? Only, you should do the writing cause my spellings crap."

"It wasn't an adventure, Vince. It was a sad series of events leading up to a trip to hospital."

"Six somersaults is an adventure, Howard! That's well impressive."

"That didn't happen, though, did it? You just made that up."

Vince stops dead and laughs, "Made it up? You're mental, Howard."

Howard tries to resist but the script beckons. It whispers into his mind, "It won't hurt to read just a little bit more, Howard. Just one scene."

It's been two weeks since Vince unveiled his 'screenplay' to Howard. The haphazard pile of odds, ends and scrap paper has nearly doubled in size since then. Clearly, the Noir muse has been active.

The script is an ode to gender confusion, pop music and unchecked mental illness.

He'll just read one page.

"Me and Howard were sleeping in the keeper hut, all well nestled in after a hard day's seed distribution and I was dreaming about being in a jungle looking for a bloke with cheese for a head, right, and I can hear Howard calling my name, "Vince!, Vince, you berk!" but I can't wake up and then someone kicks me in the belly and then I'm awake and there's a big gun right in my face. Very uncool. I mean a real big gun like the ones in American movies and this guy, dressed all in black like some kind of goth storm trooper, tells me to 'get your shit and and get out'. I can't even see his face cause he has one of those blast shield type thingies over it and I look around for Howard and he's still in his cot. He looks well confused and a bit worried. Howard starts to say something to me but then he got hit in the back of the head with a gun and told to shut up. That was the scariest part, that guy hitting Howard like that just for trying to talk to me. I know I'm aways having to save Howard when he gets into jams but when it's just a regular day, I quite rely on Howard to tell me what to do. If he didn't tell me to eat a satsuma or put the occasional slice of tomato on my toasted cheese sandwiches, I'd have died of scurvy a long time ago. I'm not good at the boring bits of life. Being hassled by strange men with over-sized guns isn't exactly boring but it isn't fun or adventurous either so I was ready to follow Howard's lead. We gathered up our stuff right quick and the goth storm troopers marched us out the zoo. That was the end of the Zooniverse. I still see Bob Fossil sometimes but he don't like to talk about what happened to the zoo. I tired to visit once, after we got chucked out, but it was all covered in giant tents like that scene in E.T. Then it disapeared all together."

Howard feels a slight pain in his heart as he reads Vince's rambling tale. This is the one part of the script that is completely accurate. He well remembers being woken from a sound sleep to find the receiving end of a laughably large gun pointed at his head. Time had slowed down just like in the movies. He remembers looking at Vince, sleeping peacefully, oblivious to the fact he was about to die.

_"Wake him up," barked the man with the gun. Howard hesitated, thinking it would be better if Vince simply slept through their execution._

_"Wake him up or I will."_

_He called Vince's name and the younger man stirred but refused open his eyes until one of the uniformed goons kicked him hard in the stomach. Howard had flinched sympathetically and was rewarded with two more guns pointed in his direction. He'd tried to say something nice to Vince, some little useless assurance that they would be all right but he no sooner opened his mouth than his teeth were rattled by a blow to the back of the head._

"I had gone from living with my parents to living at the zoo and I had no idea what I was going to do. Howard and I were walking down the road with all our stuff wondering what we was gonna get up to now and I thought about Naboo. He's a shaman an' all so I figured he'd probably have the scoop on where to find a cheap flat..."

_"What are we gonna do, Howard?"_

_Vince had looked up at him with his absurdly big blue eyes. When he was worried, he looked like a cartoon character, the Japanese kind where the people are always missing face parts He'd forgiven Vince for many an offense on account of those cartoony eyeballs. He'd offered some reassuring nonsense when, in fact, he had been pretty sure they were going to end up tramps or male prostitutes. Maybe both._

_"I talked to Naboo when Bambridge tried to sell the zoo. He said he was thinking of becoming a mighty hawk."_

_"A what?"_

_"A mighty hawk," Vince repeated but with a more mystical inflection._

_"What? A drug dealing mighty hawk?" Howard had asked with sincere confusion. It was hard to tell sometimes if Vince was taking the piss or being sincerely weird._

_"He's not a drug dealer, Howard! He's a shaman!"_

_"He is, well was, a fake fortune teller at a crappy zoo who sells drugs out of his kiosk. If it weren't for his steady customers, the zoo would have gone out of business years ago."_

_Vince looked petulant but didn't argue, he just changed the subject, "I hope Bollo is okay."_

_Bollo, the elderly ape, had died a year ago and Vince, Howard and Joey Moose had been taking turns wearing an ape suit at Fossil's insistence. Vince, against all reason, had taken to referring to Joey Moose as Bollo. No one questioned it, Vince's eccentricity was part of his charm, an accessory he wore with style like his Chelsea boots and cowboy hats. _

Of course, the answer did lie with Naboo (AKA Tony) who bought a shop and rented half the upstairs flat to Vince and Howard. Tony sold his wares under the guise of his knick-knack store while Vince and Howard tried to find new jobs. There wasn't much call for half-trained and ill-educated zoo keepers. Eventually Tony was successful enough to need fake employees to make his shop look legit. Howard wasn't sure which was worse, being a fake shop assistant or a real drug dealer. Both surely indicated a life gone wrong.

Not that he sold drugs, he just facilitated the purchasing of illicit items.

Howard turned back to the 'script', this part was written in eyeliner on a candy-wrapper.

"I was rubbing my tummy where the guy kicked me and Howard told me to hike up my shirt and let him have a look. He just poked around a bit, trying to figure out if I needed to go to hospital or not but it felt strange when he touched me like that. It felt like he was looking at me willy or something instead of just me gut."

Howard lightly pounded his head on the counter. Those fleeting, awkward moments that pass between men and are ignored by sensible persons played a major role in Vince's tales of adventure. No moment of uncomfortable homoeroticism was left undocumented. Howard jumped at the sound of the bell meant to alert him to the presence of a customer. He flushed and jammed the candy wrapper into the middle of Vince's scrapheap and turned his attention to the nervous looking young man.

"Um, Joey said I should come here and talk to Howard or Vince?"

"Well," Howard announced while straightening his hat, "I'm Howard Moon, the Moon man, coming at you like a ray, like a beam, like a kestrel..."

"Can I just get like a dime bag?" The young man asked as he shifted nervously from foot to foot.

Howard looked about the shop, "A dime bag? Is that a small bag in which you carry dimes? I've not heard of such an invention but it does sound handy."

"Look, I don't remember what he said to say! I just want a dime and I'll go. Please."

Howard stroked his chin, "I can't tell if you're a mad man or a genius, I'll reckon you're a little of both."

The conversation lasted another fifteen minutes before the young idiot gave up and left, leaving Howard to return to his reading. He grabbed another slip of paper from the pile. This one was written on a Chinese take-out menu.

"The Tale of the Crack Fox."

Howard laughed aloud at the title. Vince was always insisting the urban foxes in their area were crack addicts who would 'rape you as soon as look at you'.

He continued to laugh as he read the strange story.

"So I gave away my magnificent cloak to some grubby tramp just so Howard would know he's my best mate and I was sorry for being selfish and all and the tramp was so excited I gave him the cloak, he changed his mind about rapin' me and throwin' me in a bin which was good cause I was well nervous about that happenin'..."

That tramp did frequently mention he wanted to rape Vince, nearly every time they walked by his street corner. They called him Rapin' Thom.

It was Howard who decided the tramp was named Tom, it was Vince who decided he would spell it with an h.

The bell rang and the young man was back. He looked around the shop and picked up a dinged up teapot.

"I want to buy this," he announced, plunking the pot on the table.

Howard grabbed a dime bag from behind the counter, slipped it inside the teapot, and into a plain brown paper bag.

He took the young man's money and gave him a receipt.

"What was all that about?" the young man whispered as he took his change and receipt for 'one teapot', "All that stuff about being a beam'n'at?"

"Just a shopkeeper trying to make a living. Can I help you with anything else? Perhaps a pencil box decorated with a picture of Charlie Parker?"

The young man wisely moved along.

Howard returned to the Tale of the Crack Fox. He was curious how it would all turn out.


End file.
